You are running a business, let’s call it a legal practice, and you have a problem. You are spending too much time dealing with a small irritation. The irritation could be just about anything, but let’s say the issue is that your invoicing system doesn’t connect with your contact management system. “System” may be too strong a word for many. Essentially, when you issue an invoice for your services, the bill doesn’t automatically show up in the file where you keep other details about the same client. As a result, each time you issue a bill, you have to remember . . . [more]

For the next while the Friday Fillip will be a chapter in a serialized crime novel, interrupted occasionally by a reference you might like to follow up. Both this chapter of the book and the whole story up to this point can be had as PDF files. You may also subscribe to have chapters delivered to you by email.

MEASURING LIFE
 
Chapter 10
Expertise

How should CLE providers approach the issue of self-representing litigants?

I’m sure all Slaw readers are aware of the phenomenon of the rise of the self-represented litigant. Over the past 20 years there has been a vast increase in the number of people coming to court or interacting with the justice system without legal representation. In British Columbia, this change correlates with the decline in legal aid, although this is only one reason for the increase.

You could take the view that this development should have little impact on education of the legal profession. But if you’re invested in the . . . [more]

On March 26, 2015, the Quebec government tabled Bill 42, An Act to group the Commission de l’équité salariale, the Commission des normes du travail and the Commission de la santé et de la sécurité du travail and to establish the Administrative Labour Tribunal in the National Assembly. The goal of the bill is to consolidate various employment and labour boards into one administrative labour board, among other things. . . . [more]

In five preceding articles I have described the idea behind becoming a very highly valued five-tools project manager, ready to manage each of the five progress factors:

• Manage the project, starting with the project charter (discussed in the previous article).
• Manage the client, starting with the Conditions of Satisfaction.
• Manage time, starting with the Off Switch.
• Manage money, starting with budgets.
• Manage the team, starting with assigning tasks accurately.

Of these, the budget is by far the hardest tool to write about, because it is highly individualistic. It varies in form and approach by project manager, by practice, by type . . . [more]

Depending on how you define a self driving car – probably sooner than you think.

Sometimes new technology seems to come out of nowhere, but it often creeps up on us. Legal disruptions that new tech spawns often follows the same path – usually a combination of lagging behind new technology, and getting in the way of new technology.

Current advances that come to mind include smart watches, drones, electric cars, and Tesla’s Powerwall.

Take self driving cars for example.

Its not as if we will go directly from a totally human driven car to a totally autonomous car. They . . . [more]

Earlier this week at its annual conference in Moncton, the Canadian Association of Law Libraries announced that the Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History book series was the winner of the 2015 Hugh Lawford Award for Excellence in Legal Publishing.

Over the past 35 years, the Society has published books that cover the breadth of Canadian legal history, including the history of crime and punishment, women and the law, the legal treatment of minorities and much more.

The Award is named after the late Hugh Lawford, law professor at Queen’s in Kingston, Ontario and the founder of Quicklaw. . . . [more]

I have been working for some time on a book-length manuscript (introduced here earlier) tracing the history of the idea of intellectual property before there was a legal class of intellectual property in the modern sense (which is usually said to originate with the Statute of Anne 1710). My history is focused on the particular, if not peculiar, class of intellectual property associated with learning and the learned, which is to say with works of scholarship and research.

The book itself is a good number of months and two reviews away from publication, so this is not an infomercial-blog for . . . [more]

Each Wednesday we tell you which three English-language cases and which French-language case have been the most viewed* on CanLII and we give you a small sense of what the cases are about.

For this last week:

1. White Burgess Langille Inman v. Abbott and Haliburton Co., 2015 SCC 23

[1] Expert opinion evidence can be a key element in the search for truth, but it may also pose special dangers. To guard against them, the Court over the last 20 years or so has progressively tightened the rules of admissibility and enhanced the trial judge’s gatekeeping role. These . . . [more]

In his presentation at the Canadian Association of Law Libraries Conference subtitled Triangulating Legal Literature, Paul McKenna offered that the idea of three is prevalent … Something that resonated with me as a process improvement professional. My first memory of the bell curve with Sigma lines being a visual in a CALL Conference slide. I was so astonished I didn’t get a picture!

Seeing the Forest for the Threes

McKenna brought up the Theoretical Perspective of Albert Borgman – Blending the social analysis and philosophy to argue that technology creates a pattern in human lives that consists of natural, cultural . . . [more]

Bifurcation, or the splitting and deferring of the resolution of issues, is common in intellectual property proceedings. If a case is bifurcated, the issue of liability is determined first, followed by the remedies, but only if necessary.

In the example of a patent case, the first part of the proceeding would focus on the validity and infringement of the patent to determine whether the defendant has infringed the patent. If there is infringement, in the second part, the amount of monetary relief is then determined.

The Rule

The Federal Courts Rules, applicable in the Federal Court where most IP cases . . . [more]

A Deputy Small Claims Court Judge who made the decision to allow a trial to continue on its second day notwithstanding that one of the parties failed to show up has been overturned by the Divisional Court.

The trial which was originally scheduled for only one day, took place over two days. The first day of trial was August 28, 2013. On that day the court heard from two witnesses. The first witness gave evidence in chief and was cross-examined by the defendants. The second witness then gave their evidence in chief. At this time it was determined that . . . [more]